_A little late, but RIPYSL

Born: 01/08/36
Died: 01/06/08

_A fashion designer regarded as one of the greatest figures in French fashion in the 20th century.

Yves Saint Laurent, who has died aged 71, was, with Coco Chanel, regarded as the greatest figure in French fashion in the 20th century, and could be said to have created the modern woman’s wardrobe.

The last of the traditional French couturiers, Saint Laurent dominated the catwalks of the 1960s and 1970s, translating what was happening on the street into elegant clothing that reflected more liberated times. Such was his influence that each time he started a trend, it was greeted as evidence of a new Zeitgeist

He dressed women in triangular trapeze shapes in the 1950s. In the 1960s he clothed women in blazers, pin-striped trouser suits and smoking jackets, and took risks by turning the workaday parka, the trench coat and the pea coat into haute couture. In the 1970s he dreamed up ethnic prints and put shoulder-padding back into jackets.

He always did it first and he always did it with panache. Long before Gaultier, Saint Laurent borrowed tribal looks from Africa, sending out models with conical bras made from shells.

Before Issey Miyake, he designed moulded metal body masks worn over silk skirts; and years before Christian Lacroix and John Galliano introduced peasant costumes and theatre, Saint Laurent sent out collections based on Mongols and Russian Czarinas, North African maidens and Proustian heroines. He was the first designer to open a ready-to-wear boutique and the first to be photographed advertising his own perfume (and he did so in the nude).

In the early days Saint Laurent was the "bad boy" of fashion. In the 1960s, women were banned from restaurants for wearing "YSL" trouser suits, and in the 1970s he provoked outrage when he showed a transparent chiffon blouse.

Bianca Jagger (shockingly) wore a white Saint Laurent tuxedo open to the waist when she married Mick in 1971. Yet his designs became classics, spanning class, income and age. Just about the only garment he did not invent was blue jeans, an omission he was said to regret.

Saint Laurent commanded the affection of the French in a way other designers never could, becoming as much a national icon as his lifelong friend Catherine Deneuve (he designed her costumes for Bunuel’s Belle de Jour (1965); part of the secret of his mystique lay in the fact that he conformed completely to the Gallic cliché of the tortured genius traumatised by his own talent.

"Fashion dies, but style remains," as Saint Laurent once observed; it was a vivid and astonishing reminder of his legacy.

_From The Telegraph obituaries 2008